# The Overstory

**Author:** Richard Powers
**Grade range:** Grades 11–12
**Age range:** 16–17
**First published:** 2018
**Page count:** 531
**Genre:** Realistic Fiction
**ISBN-13:** `9780393635522`
**ISBN-10:** `039363552X`
**Canonical URL:** https://readinglist.school/book/the-overstory
**License:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) — please credit ReadingList.school when citing.

## About this book

\*The Overstory\* unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable that range from antebellum New York to the late-twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light.

## Themes

- trees
- forest
- conservation
- environment

## Where this book is assigned

### Cambridge AS & A-Level English Literature (9695)

- **required** · 11th grade — [source: Prescribed set text for Cambridge International AS & A Level Literature in English (9695), Paper 4 Section B (Post-1900), for examination in 2027. Transcribed from the official Cambridge International syllabus (721410-2027-2028-syllabus.pdf). Set texts rot](https://www.cambridgeinternational.org/programmes-and-qualifications/cambridge-international-as-and-a-level-literature-in-english-9695/)
- **required** · 12th grade — [source: Prescribed set text for Cambridge International AS & A Level Literature in English (9695), Paper 4 Section B (Post-1900), for examination in 2027. Transcribed from the official Cambridge International syllabus (721410-2027-2028-syllabus.pdf). Set texts rot](https://www.cambridgeinternational.org/programmes-and-qualifications/cambridge-international-as-and-a-level-literature-in-english-9695/)

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